Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Meditation

Learn to be silent.
Let your
quiet mind
listen and absorb.

Pythagoras
(580 B.C. -- 500 B.C.)

A Greek philosopher and mathematician, Pythagoras was especially interested in the study of mathematics in relation to weights and measures and to musical theory.

All man's miseries derive from not being
able to sit quietly in a room alone.

Blaise Pasca(1623-1662)

Blaise Pascal was a French philosopher, scientist, mathematician, and writer, whose treatises contributed to the fields of hydraulics and pure geometry.

This is the one time in this collection of great contributors that I have elected to highlight two writers on the same subject. I selected two men whose lives were separated by over two millennia, both of whom in their own times were considered the most knowledgeable in the rational fields of mathematics and science.

Pythagoras, whose writings influenced the thought of Plato and Aristotle, was a major contributor to the development of both mathematics and Western rational philosophy. Blaise Pascal, a famous French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher who lived twenty-two centuries after Pythagoras, is considered one of the original scientific minds. He is responsible for inventing the syringe, the hydraulic press, and the first digital calculator. Pascal's Law of Pressure is still taught in science classes around the world today.

Keeping in mind the left-brained scientific leanings of these two scientists, reread theirtwo quotes. Pascal: "All man's miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone." Pythagoras: "Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb." They both speak to the importance of silence and the value of meditation in your life, whether you are an accountant or an avatar. They send us a valuable message about a way of being *in life that is not popularly encouraged 'in our culture: that there is tremendous value *in creating alone time *in your life that is spent in silence. If you want to shed your miseries, learn to sit silently in a room alone and meditate.

It has been estimated that the average person has sixty thousand separate thoughts each and every day. The problem with this is that we have the same sixty thousand thoughts today that we had yesterday, and we'll repeat them again tomorrow. Our minds are filled with the same chatter day in and day out. Learning to be quiet and meditate involves figuring out a way to enter the spaces between your thoughts; or the gap, as I call it. In this silent empty space between your thoughts, you can find a sense of total peace' in a realm that is ordinarily unknowable. Here, any illusion of your separateness is shattered. However, if you have sixty thousand separate thoughts in a day, there is literally no time available to enter the space between your thoughts, because there is no space!

Most of us have minds that race full-speed day and night. Our thoughts are a hodgepodge of continuous dialogue about schedules, money worries, sexual fantasies, grocery lists, drapery problems, concern about the children, vacation plans, and on and on like a merry-go-round that never stops. Those sixty thousand thoughts are usually about ordinary daily activities and create a mental pattern that leaves no space for silence.

This pattern reinforces our cultural belief that all gaps in conversation (silence) need to be filled quickly. For many, silence represents an embarrassment and a social defect. Therefore we learn to jump in to fill these spaces, whether or not our filler has any substance. Silent periods in a car or at a dinner are perceived as awkward moments, and good conversationalists know how to get those spaces occupied with some kind of noise.

And so it is with ourselves as well; we have no training in silence, and we see it as unwieldy and confusing. Thus we keep the inner dialogue going just like the outer.Yet it is in that silent place, where our ancient teacher Pythagoras tells us to let our quiet mind listen and absorb, that confusion will disappear and enlightened guidance will come to us. But meditation also affects the quality of our nonsilent activities. The daily practice of meditation is the single thing in my life that gives me a greater sense of well-being, increased energy, higher productivity at a more conscious level, more satisfying relationships, and a closer connection to God.

The mind is like a pond. On the surface you see all the disturbances, yet the surface is only a fraction of the pond. It is in the depth below the surface, where there is stillness, that you will come to know the true essence of the pond, as well as your own mind. By going below the surface, you come to the spaces between your thoughts where you are able to enter the gap. The gap is total emptiness or silence, and it is indivisible. No matter how many times you cut silence in half, you still get silence. This is what is meant by now. Perhaps it is the essence of God, that which cannot be divided from the oneness.

These two pioneering scientists, who are still quoted today in university courses, were studying the nature of the universe. They struggled with the mysteries of energy, pressure, mathematics, space, time, and universal truths. Their message to all of us here is quite simple. If you want to understand the universe, or your own personal universe, if you want to know how it all works, then be quiet and face your fear of sitting in a room alone and going deep within the layers of your own mind...